A major goal of air traffic management is to strategically
control the flow of traffic so that the demand at an airport
meets but does not exceed the operational capacity in a dynamic environment.
This paper uses the concept of receding horizon control
(RHC) to conduct real-time planning for airport capacity management
(ACM). It is shown that RHC provides a generic and flexible
framework for developing real-time allocation algorithms for
airport capacity in a dynamic and uncertain environment, and existing
approaches such as the one step ahead adjustment can be
considered as special cases of this approach. Robustness against
the change of the environment and demands and computational
efficiency are two advantages when applying RHC to the ACM
problem, which are illustrated by a case study.